


Among the Living

by RedheadAmongWolves



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Character Study, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Immortal!Jack Sparrow, Immortality, Jack's first love is the sea and I'm sad, Multi, Non-Linear Narrative, i love how that's a tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-27
Updated: 2019-06-27
Packaged: 2020-05-20 15:45:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19379779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedheadAmongWolves/pseuds/RedheadAmongWolves
Summary: “You’re getting old, Jack,” Barbossa lies.There are some things only the sea remembers.





	Among the Living

**Author's Note:**

> Literally just a 1300 word drabble about immortal!Jack Sparrow. Loosely follows canon.
> 
> title comes from the first movie: "The moonlight shows us for what we really are. We are not among the living, so we cannot die, but neither are we dead."
> 
> oof me hearty

“You’re getting old, Jack,” Barbossa lies.

 

Jack is not as old as the sea, but it’s a close thing.

Sometimes someone will ask him about the old days, and he’ll say he doesn’t remember, but it’s always with a smile, a flourish of his hand, a tilt of a rum bottle, so they always think he’s lying. They tell him to keep his secrets, then, and Jack watches them leave, and grow old, and die, and leave and grow old and die, and Jack remains, unchanged, unable to follow.

He isn’t lying, however, when he says he doesn’t remember. The old days are a blur, half because of the rum and half because what else can the days do except run together, when you have as many of them as Jack?

He remembers the first time he opened his eyes and saw nothing but blue. He remembers the first time he tasted salt. What was before that, he can’t say. What will come after, he doesn’t know if he wants to know.

And so the compass spins.

 

He is younger than Calypso, because he’s not sure anyone is older than her. They are inseparable from the moment they meet, never having known another like themselves, and they are eager in their eternities, still wild and in awe.

She teaches him the language of the water slapping against the hull of their ship, and he learns how to kill a man by watching her, how to take something that isn’t his, lives and gold and hearts and desires. In exchange he teaches her how to travel by the stars, how to read the winds tugging at their hair, but she is more interested in depths than heights, and he can’t fault her for this. Late at night, when the water is glass beneath them, it is easy to forget which way is up, and which is down.

He is older than Davy, though, the young sailor he and Calypso meet and tug into their bed, but Jack’s first and truest love is the sea, of course it is, and so he watches Calypso reach into Davy’s chest and wrap her fingers around his beating heart, and he does nothing to stop her.

When she is human, imprisoned in flesh and bone and Jack doesn’t have the heart to tell her why, she moves inland, wraps herself in the rivers and the marshlands because they connect to the sea like arteries, like so many veins, and she thinks these paths will guide her lover home, but she forgets it is harder to swim upriver. Jack still visits her often, though, and brings the sea in his boots to slosh along her floors, and she buries her hands in his hair and they both close their eyes and imagine different people as they crash into each other.

 

It is short-lived, but Jack envies a dying man and follows him around the world a half dozen times. The man treats him like a son, until Jack starts to feel the dread skitter up his spine, that rare, ugly feeling, the fear of losing the few things he holds dear.

He tries to give the man eternity, but the man gives it back. Jack is lost.

“You’ve seen it all, done it all. You survived. That’s the trick, isn’t it? To survive?” he asks, desperate to persuade him to stay.

“It’s not just about living forever,” the man who is not his father tells him. “The trick is living with yourself forever.”

Jack lets go, more sand falling from his fingers to the shore.

 

And so when Davy tells him he is worth a hundred souls, Jack thinks, he must be lonely. Davy always envied Calypso and him, their fearlessness, their recklessness, and Jack knows it’s partially his fault, having dangled eternity just out of Davy’s grasp, stringing him along. They sailed together, the three of them, for years and years, until Davy started to panic, seeing the grey sprout through his hair and the creases deepen around his eyes while Jack and Calypso remained untouched by time.

“It’s funny what a man will do to forestall his final judgement,” Davy mutters. Jack doesn’t know which of them he is referring to.

 

Jack chases the gold, and Davy’s heart, and the fountain, because they expect him too, but also because he has lived enough days to know the sand in the hourglass always trickles out eventually. He wants to be ready when it does. Wants the choice, whatever it is, to be his, not destiny’s, though he knows Calypso would laugh at him for thinking this.

The Aztec gold, however, he pursues because he wants to know how it feels to _change_. Even if it is just bones. He wants to know what it feels like without this same skin, this same flesh, this same weight. He has carried them for millennia. It is why jail cells do not bother him. His body is enough of a prison.

He stumbles into the moonlight, and he is weightless. It is sudden and bewildering. He is light itself. He dances the coin across his stripped knuckles, revels in the sensation. Barbossa gapes at him, and Jack laughs. He wonders if this is what eternity feels like to others. He laughs, so he does not yearn.

 

Davy was not the first to carve out his own heart. But he is the only one to bury it in sand.

 

Jack meets Elizabeth, and Will, and so many others who are so, so young, and for so many years he never bothered to learn their names, they came and went with the tides, but Elizabeth accuses him of being a good man, and Will looks at him like he is, and here Jack finds himself yet again in love with people he cannot keep.

They twine around one another, push and pull like waves, and for the first time in his life, Jack tries to slow down time. He revels in every second. He thirsts, and hungers. He holds on.

Later, Jack holds Davy’s heart in his hand and remembers a time when it was his to play with, thinks how easily he could crush it, thinks how he could rule the seas, give a purpose to his wandering. But instead, he gives the heart to Will, and to Elizabeth, because some time is better than no time, is better than all of time.

Elizabeth accuses him of being a good man, and Jack lets her go.

 

Jack was born at sea, or reborn at sea, or however it is he came into being. He took his first steps on the rollicking deck of a sailboat. There’s a legend his first breath stirred a hurricane.

They’re docked in Tortuga, restocking and, ah, partaking in the spoils land has to offer, when he hears a new recruit asking Gibbs if Jack is always drunk, the way he wobbles about on shore.

Gibbs’ reply, when it comes, makes the hole where Jack’s heart should be ache. “He walks in time with the sea,” Gibbs answers. “I’ve never seen a man more steady on his feet than Jack on his ship, nor a man more lost on land.”

 

He smiles when Elizabeth chains him to the Pearl, because won’t it be interesting, to see what happens when a man who can’t be killed, dies?

It’s just his luck, that even the afterlife spits him back out.

 

Sometimes he gets flashes of memories he’s not sure are his own. Hands worn soft from sea air, a voice like a rumble of thunder over still water. Hands pulling him down, hands pulling him up. The ocean is the only constant. Closing over his head. Filling his lungs. He breathes in time to the tides.

The sails of his Pearl snap in the winds behind him, and he takes out his compass, and the arrow finds its mark. He calls their heading to Gibbs. They set sail, canvas blowing them to the horizon, until they disappear into the blue.

 

“You’re getting old, Jack,” Barbossa lies, and Jack grins at him, at circumstance, at destiny.

**Author's Note:**

> can you tell how much I don’t want characters to leave me lolololol see u in therapy
> 
> the dialogue is almost all from the movies cause i’m a sap! 
> 
> (i don’t own anything/profit from this, yada yada yada, disclaimers disclaimers disclaimers)
> 
> hope u enjoyed pls comment!!!


End file.
